(10/4/04) punk rock cafe; casa bonita hotel

(Dreams only written in daytime paper journal. No time/place info given.)

Dream 1

I was in a bright cafe that was packed with people. It looked like a bar, but it was a cafe. It was morning. I think it was even a cold morning. But it was warm in the cafe. The cafe was bright and felt open in spite of people all being almost right on top of each other. The walls were white, and there was a window wall out front to the busy street. It was as if everybody here knew each other, like we were all in some club or group together.

I sat at the bar. There was a beautiful, blonde waitress or barista in a white, button-up shirt taking people's orders and generally being friendly and/or flirtatious. I didn't feel like I fit in. I felt like I was being grumpy or stupid around all these well-put-together, happy, mature people.

I listened to some music that was playing on a stereo right behind me. As I listened I took the lead from the guitar chords (it was a punk song) and starting riffing off a new song to myself. I was really excited. It felt good to be riffing off an upbeat song, a punk song. And I was actually making a complexly structured song, with three or four melodic sections. I got pretty excited, though I half-wondered whether I wasn't just singing directly from the CD or at least so close that it didn't count, anyway.

But I also think that on a very low level I knew I was dreaming, because I told myself, Remember what you're doing. Remember the song you're creating. And I meant it like I would tell myself, Remember your dream. (Of course I didn't remember the song.)

The song on the CD player now ended. Some slower, sadder song came on. I wanted to listen to the CD song again, though, so I could get my own song memorized. Plus, oddly, I really liked the song playing, and I was kind of upset that by creating my own song I had missed hearing the actual song itself.

So I got up and worked my way a few feet back to the CD player. I was about to replay the song, but I suddenly felt like everybody was looking at me, especially a kind of mean, judgmental guy. I didn't want to replay the song and have them all stare at me.

Someone asked me, "What are you doing? Do you wnat to replay that song? Well, just ask XXXXX." (The waitress.)

The waitress was now walking down toward me, not behind the bar, but down the crowded aisle between the bar and seats. I asked her if I could replay the song. She apparently said yes, because I hit what I thought was the replay button. I don't know what happened after that, but I'm pretty sure the song I wanted didn't play.

Dream 2

I was walking through some restaurant area like a Casa Bonita mixed together with a hotel. It was all beige and full of ramps and hills and table booths. Then I was in a stairwell.

(4/23/06) unfamiliar food; truck crash is my fault

(Entered in paper journal at 10:45 AM at Starbucks on 1st Street and 7th Avenue in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

I walked into my room late at night. The room was big but a little like a hospital room. My bed was a lot like a hospital bed. The floor had a black and white octagon tile design (like in the bathroom of a place I'd lived in in waking life Harlem in 2005). I had a sink at the back end of the room -- like a hospital sink.

I wanted to go to bed. I kicked my foot against my fridge. It popped open. It looked disgusting, but not as disgusting as I'd thought it would. Plus there was food in it, packaged food, mostly like plastic bottles in which one might find milk or yogurt drinks.

I closed the fridge but then thought I'd open it again to see the food, none of which, on reflection, was anything I remembered having gotten recently. But I opened a fridge to the left of the first fridge. This was a tall fridge with two vertical doors, like my mom's fridge.

I had thought before that someone had come into my room and put weird food in my fridge. In the tall fridge was a note, written in capital letters with red marker, explaining everything. The note said that my landlord had brought this new stuff into my room because he didn't want me to leave. He wanted me to feel more comfortable right here.

I couldn't believe it. I reached into the fridge to see if it -- and the food -- was real.

Dream 2

It was daytime. I was out by a huge road. The road curved away to the right. On either side of the road were big, mangled-looking buildings. In the center of the road ran a concrete barrier.

Big vehicles, enormous trucks, mostly, sped by, going at a frightening pace. But I needed to get across the road. I need to deliver something from my bosses on one side of the road to a boss on the other side. There was a smart, safe way to do it. But the trucks scared me, so I wanted to get past my fears by going straight through the traffic.

I got to the barrier, maybe even straddled it, when something bad happened with the trucks. Either they crashed with each other or they crashed into buildings. I had failed and caused this crash by not doing the safe thing.

One building across the street could no longer be used for work -- it may have been being built, close to being done, but now it would take much longer to finish. One of my previous bosses, PG, was very angry.

A woman to my right, walking with me back across the now empty street, told me not to worry, that the present building was fine for at least another year or two. We were now inside the building, which had a tall atrium. We walked from one side to another and then back to the front of the lobby, to a reception desk.

As we went around the told me that we would be covering (doing investment research on) a new sector -- something to do with hospitals. I said, "Oh, isn't RO in that sector? He's a pretty smart guy, and pretty cool. But for some reason he's always scared me."

I sat down in the reception desk. There were stacks of books and journals and papers all over. I knew I had a lot of studying to do.

(8/10/07) narcissistic toilet

(Entered in paper journal at 5:45 AM on Q-train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.)

Dream #1

I was in a building like a hotel. My mom, who may have worked at the same place as I, had called me back to work when she saw that I had filled out some internet form incorrectly. I could "see" my mom up in some top level, a smallish area like an apartment, with thin, plywood walls, like in a double-wide trailer. My mom sat on a high stool and typed on a computer that stood on a narrow table.

I went up floors through different levels of the hotel: a nice mezzanine, some kind of fire escape area, and finally a lovely series of floors like dormitory or apartment halls.

I found a bathroom on one floor. I went in. I needed to defecate. There were three toilets. I felt like since there were three toilets, and all three were currently unoccupied, at least one must have been left "sabotaged" by someone.

So I checked the toilets. The one farthest from me was a wide stall, like the handicap-equipped stalls. I didn't want to go in there. The second one looked fine at first glance. But when I walked in I saw that it was a stall within a stall, i.e. you needed to open two doors to get to the toilet. Something about this seemed discomforting, so I walked out of the stall. The third stall was almost regular. I sat down on the toilet.

I began defecating. I looked down into the bowl of the toilet. My feces was orange-brown. And it just kept coming and coming out of me. I thought, This much shit, of this strange color, can't be good.

I saw, in the reflection of the water, the feces coming out of my anus. I thought, So this is what my anus looks like. I felt I shouldn't look at the reflection too long: I might get depressed by the carnal aspect of my existence, or else become morbidly drawn in to, mesmerized by, the "dirty parts" of my own body.

I looked away, but somehow I could still see the reflection, not as if in my mind's eye, but as if, though I was looking upward, forward, another part of me, physically, were still looking downward.